Holocaust Testimony and Memory
Saving Our Survivors: How Americans Learned about the Holocaust
How did American Jews come to learn about the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of the war? What kinds of images and representations of Holocaust survivors first circulated in America, when most Jewish survivors were still stuck in European displaced persons camps? Drawing on communal records and previously unexamined cultural materials, Saving Our Survivors details the kinds of narratives that inspired American Jewish action in the wake of the Holocaust and argues that American Jewish communal life became a significant site of knowledge formation and dissemination about the Holocaust. Through organizational campaign materials, public speeches, appeal letters, brochures, posters, radio broadcasts, and short films, American Jews were compelled to act as heroes, saving Jewish lives and a Jewish future.
Bringing postwar communal narratives into the longer history of Holocaust memory in America challenges our understanding of what Holocaust narratives look and sound like and invites us to consider the relationship between humanitarian aid and the narratives they employ to inspire action. By expanding our understanding of how stories about the Holocaust became part of an American discourse and considering multiple forms of Holocaust survivor accounts, Saving Our Survivors highlights the messy, diffuse, and contested nature of memory construction in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, as well as each new tragedy we confront.
Published by Indiana University Press in May 2025. Available for pre-order now.
Holocaust Research Lab
Directed by Professor Todd Presner (UCLA), the purpose of the lab is to develop and apply computational methods of analysis to expand how we read, hear, and analyze Holocaust and genocide testimonies. Deblinger has been part of this research initiative since 2012. Learn more >
Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory
The Holocaust is one of the most documented—and now digitized—events in human history. Institutions and archives hold hundreds of thousands of hours of audio and video testimony, composed of more than a billion words in dozens of languages, with millions of pieces of descriptive metadata. It would take several lifetimes to engage with these testimonies one at a time. Computational methods could be used to analyze an entire archive—but what are the ethical implications of “listening” to Holocaust testimonies by means of an algorithm? In this book, Todd Presner explores how the digital humanities can provide both new insights and humanizing perspectives for Holocaust memory and history.
Deblinger co-wrote the book’s conclusion: “Cultural Memory Machines and the Futures of Testimony.” Explore the chapter online >
Published by Princeton University Press in 2024.
Additional Publications and Research Presentations
- “Building International Partnerships for Digitisation and Preservation,” Journal of Digital Media Management. Volume (10, 2). Co-authored with Jennifer Osorio, Sharon E Farb, Todd Grappone.
- Rachel Deblinger, “Remix, remember, retweet: meditations on Holocaust memory, social media, and antisemitism online,” Misinformation, Media Manipulation, and Antisemitism Symposium at The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (February 5, 2020). View video of the full symposium.
- “Digital Humanities Methods for Analyzing Holocaust and Genocide Testimonies”: panel presentation at DH2020, Association of Digital Humanities Organizations. Featuring: Todd Presner (chair), Anna Bonazzi, Rachel Deblinger, Lizhou Fan, David Shepard, and Gabor Toth (2020).
- “Purim, Passover, & Pilgrims: Symbols of Survival and Sacrifice in American postwar Holocaust survivor narratives,” in Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post Holocaust Decades, ed. Sheila Elana Jelen and Eleana Adler (Wayne State University Press, 2017)
- Rachel Deblinger, “The Holocaust, Walls and Ephemerality” Magnes Museum (March 8, 2017).
- “In a world still trembling”: American Jewish philanthropy and the shaping of Holocaust survivor narratives in postwar America (1945-1953). Dissertation. Available online at escholarship.org >